Articles in “General”

In other words, Nick has solved the recurring problem with the comments on the site.

Hip hip hurrah!

Once again, I’m addressing a topic that has little to do with my proposed focus for the blog, although it did come out of something that I’ve been reading.

Namely, I’ve been reading forum postings about inviting family for Easter dinner, and it took rather a strange direction: people started wondering why it was okay to eat lamb at Easter, which many posters said made them feel a bit funny, but not to eat rabbit.

I think this is a case of confusing the metaphorical with the actual.

Sure, Jesus is frequently referred to as The Lamb of God.

But he isn’t actually a baby sheep. It’s a metaphor.

But the Easter Bunny, on the other hand, is actually a rabbit. A real rabbit. (Yes, he is a real rabbit. I’m not accepting any suggestions that he doesn’t actually exist, even though the Easter Bunny that I grew up with bought his eggs at Woolies on Easter Monday once they’d gone on special.)

So eating rabbit on Easter might lead to some fairly horrified children if someone can’t distinguish an anthropomorphic animal from his less vocal colleagues, and the next Easter rolls around without any eggs at all.

Just, as Nick suggests, as some beneficent deity intended.

The new MacBook is here—and it’s lovely. The keyboard is a vast improvement on the last one, and this one hasn’t had a chance to turn a nasty, grubby colour yet.

I would love a black one at some point, but for now the extra cost isn’t worth it yet for an aesthetic improvement.

But the most important thing? Now I can play Packrat in the living room.

I have a lecture and two tutorials to give today and my thesis needs to be ready for copying by tomorrow.

But I will update properly soon!

There are currently four crows in my back garden, two more than usual.

If there’s any increase in numbers, or I catch even a glimpse of Tippi Hedren, I’m cancelling today’s classes.

To the makers of Lynx Deodorant commercials:

Clearly, you despise women. (Unless, of course, it’s an attractive woman who is willing to sacrifice her own existence and combine with another attractive woman to create a mindless sexual object.)

It might make things easier if you just go ahead and adopt the advertising slogan “Lynx: Roofies in an Aerosol!”

To Guy Sebastian:

You’re not Ray Charles. Go away, and take the makers of Lynx Deodorant commercials with you.

I haven’t quite decided why I want to write a blog. Part of it is certainly that Nick fancies designing one, and keeps saying “You know, people would be really interested in reading what you write.”

It’s hard to resist those kind of blandishments.

Partly, it’s because I like to have an outlet, especially now my Ph.D. is coming to an end. Perhaps it might be argued, with careful use of passive voice, that my outlet should be journal articles. But there’s something enticing in a different way about a blog.

I’m ambivalent about blogs as a reader. I read them and enjoy reading them, but part of me feels as though maybe they have a privileged readership, and I’m not it. The same impulse, I suspect, drives my feeling that I may be stalking people who have voluntarily chosen to become my friends on Facebook. Every time I see someone’s birthday is coming up, I get a little guilty sensation. The fact that they have voluntarily friended me is no barrier to the guilt of a second-generation lapsed Catholic.

But I like the idea of writing one. Whether the ambivalence will grow, I can’t say.

What I can say is that I have an idea as to what I want to do with this blog, and it’s vaguely this: reading is both my career and my hobby, and that’s what this blog addresses. If I have somewhere to talk about my reading, I’m less likely to bore Nick senseless by describing in detail why I didn’t like what I just read.

That’s not to say I won’t devote the odd entry to describing how the computer players cheat in Mario Party.